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Actually, there has been quite a bit of research on two-handed input devices (Bill Buxton is well known for some of these studies, and has some videos available). They can be useful, especially if they are designed to give appropriate roles to dominant and non-dominant hands.

Actually, there has been quite a bit of research on two-handed input devices (Bill Buxton is well known for some of these studies, and has some videos available). They can be useful, especially if they are designed to give appropriate roles to dominant and non-dominant hands.

Actually, there has been quite a bit of research on two-handed input devices (Bill Buxton is well known for some of these studies, and has some videos available). They can be useful, especially if they are designed to give appropriate roles to dominant and non-dominant hands.

I think it depends on the skill of the engineers and designers of the application. For example traditional linear menus have obvious limitations that get around. Also, speech recognition has serious problems with accuracy. How much do humans use their context and commonsense understanding to make sense of the acoustic signal? My take is that really great speech recognition would probably require a serious leap in AI. That said, an efficient interface in the future is probably multimodal combining speech, hand gestures, and point and click actions to create a comfortable work environment for the particular task one is working on.

my solution
Haptics to touch what your are looking at and multidof minipulators

Thanks
First Timer

my solution
Haptics to touch what your are looking at and multidof minipulators

Thanks
First Timer

The 5620 red mouse was the Depraz mouse, aka "Swiss mouse," later produced by Logitech. Both were Swiss companies. Nice picture in this PDF (page 4). It was well loved by hackers of that era.

Early this year, I saw some fairly sophisticated interaction using a flexible input device called ShapeTape, made by Canada's Measurand. While the company is marketing it as a motion-capture and 3D modeling technology, Tovi Grossman at the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project has been working under Ravin Balakrishnan to explore other applications for ShapeTape, including as a general input device. For example, you can use it in computer-assisted design or animation to make and perform some fairly complex 3D curves and manipulations in far less time than it would take with keyboards, mice or drawing tablets.

The Association of Computing Machinery's computer-human interaction publication CHI Letters' latest edition includes their paper on the use of ShapeTape (2 MB PDF), which was presented at the ACM CHI 2003 conference on human factors in computing systems along with MPEG demonstration videos. (3 min. basic - 15 MB | 15 min. complete - 190 MB)

Grossman's Web page includes links to other videos and previous papers.

Computer graphics and animation tool-maker Alias|Wavefront also has several videos that featured former chief scientist Bill Buxton demonstrating ShapeTape in use:

• 3D Tapedrawing On The Wall 4:33 min. - 11MB
• Digital Tape Drawing 2:33 min. - 8.2MB
• Modeling With Shapetape 1:14 min. 3.9MB

And, of course, ShapeTape maker Measurand also has further information and videos.

Offtopic: The first link goes to Bill Buxton's web site. He's the chief scientist for Alias|Wavefront. Might be some interesting reading there if you're into 3D.

Human factors should not be based on opinion polls or popularity contests. That is not science, that is merely fashion. I don't care about your unsupported "suspicions" and subjective "preferences": I'm talking about objective, measurable PERFORMANCE.

-Don

What hard evidence is your opinion based on? Have you done any controlled experiments comparing the speed and error rates of track balls versus mice or other input devices? (Buxton has published many, and is recognized as an expert in that field.)

Please give me references to any results you have published, or that anyone else has published which supports your armchair rationalizations. Otherwise they're just your unsupported amateur opinions, that disagree with the facts.

-Don

Pie menus enable you to change and refine the selection during tracking, by moving around the menu to different items. You can also move out further to gain higher angular precision. On the other hand, gestures have no natural built-in way to cancel, change or refine the gesture, and no obvious prompting and feedback mechanism. So gestures are also harder to learn and remember than pie menus.

Once you've messed up a gesture, there's no way of controling how the computer will interpret it, cancel it, or correct it in-flight. You just have to hope your gesture mistake isn't interpreted as the wrong command, then undo the effects of the mistake (if possible), then try over again from the start.

Since pie menus allow you to easily browse the items, reselect, refine or cancel the selection at any time during tracking, they have much lower error rates than gesture regcognition, and are more appropriate for mission critical applications, use in noisy environments, and with low resolution input devices like trackballs or touch screens.

Compare the pie menus in The Sims to the gestures in Black and White: Pie menus can support many more distinct commands than gestures can, plus they're also self revealing (so they're easy to learn), and it's much harder to make mistakes with the pie menus.

Another practical example is ConnectedTV, a Palm application that lets you browse and personalize your TV guide, and automatically speed-dial channels by remote control (by "touch tuning"). ConnectedTV incorporates pie menus that you can quickly and reliably operate with your fingers. It's designed to be robust and easy to use when held in one hand, so you won't lose the pen behind the couch cushion, or miss the beginning of your favorite show because you were fumbling around with grafitti in the dark.

In 1993, Kurtenbach, Sellen and Buxton published a study comparing the speed and error rate of track balls, mice and pens, combined with pie and marking menus with different numbers of items. A link to the paper and the abstract are below. Their results are extremely interesting, especially comparing different numbers of items. (They showed that 8 items is the magic number, even better than 7!)

-Don

An empirical evaluation of some articulatory and cognitive aspects of marking menus.

ABSTRACT

We describe "marking menus", an extension of "pie menus". Pie menus are circular menus subdivided into sectors, each of which might correspond to a different command. Marking menus are pie menus in which the path of the cursor leaves an ink trail. Thus, selecting a sector from a marking menu creates a visual mark similar to a pen stroke on paper. Marking menus are also unique in that they ease the transition from novice to expert user. Novices can "pop-up" a menu and make a selection, whereas experts can simply make the corresponding mark without waiting for the menu to appear.

This paper describes an experiment designed to explore both articulatory and cognitive aspects of pie and marking menus. "Articulatory aspects" refers to how well subjects could execute the physical actions necessary to select from pie menus, given three different kinds of input devices (mouse, trackball, and stylus), and as the number of items in the menu increases. Articulatory aspects were investigated by presenting one group of subjects with the task of selecting from fully visible or "exposed" menus. To investigate the cognitive aspects, two other groups of subjects used invisible or "hidden" pie menus: one group with an ink trail, and one without. In order for marking menus to work effectively, users must be able to mentally represent and associate Selection from hidden menus was designed to reveal Both number of slices per menu and input device were systematically varied. We discuss the findings with respect to menu size, input device, analysis of markings used, and learning.

Hi! I'm trying to avoid a stylus in favor of just using fingers (which is why the screen only needs to be low-res).

> you have two sheets covered with resistive
> material, one which has conductors on the
> vertical sides and one with conductors on
> horizontal sides. Increase the conductors (say,
> four shorter conductors on each side, and make
> them points instead of lines).

Actually, I was looking at using something similar to the circuit in the U.Toronto paper. That circuit seems to require only one layer of sensors that sense touch and pressure by measuring capacitance at the point being touched. I think this method also provides infinite resolution.

I was thinking on the lines of using this idea and painting-on the sensors to the screen with transparent conductive paint. Another layer of transparent insulating paint would cover the track upto the sensor point.

a lot of Buxton's writings are available from his site